Could Software QA Outsourcing be the Answer for your Software QA Headaches?

If you’ve landed here, you’re probably curious about how software QA outsourcing can contribute to your software QA program. You just want your software to be high quality and delivered as quickly as possible to your customers and prospects.

That goal seems elusive at times, even when all your testing is done in-house.

Where Does Software Testing Fail?

A poorly performing software testing effort fails to produce two critical outputs – Confidence and Speed. There are a wide variety of reasons why your software QA is not performing to your satisfaction. Mostly, we find that inadequate or failing software testing efforts have one of three fundamental issues.

Poorly defined Value Proposition, Goals and Plan

The wrong people testing your software

A weak or ineffective Software QA Process

If you’re missing one of these critical factors then you’re probably seeing some friction and challenges in your software QA efforts. If you’re missing two or more, then you’re probably in the middle of a hot mess.

But, there is hope and even the worst situation can be turned around with a clear focus on the basics. Here’s how…

Why Software QA? Your Brand Depends On It.

Let’s face it – if you didn’t have to test your software you probably wouldn’t. From one standpoint, it’s just a job that has to be done to make you don’t disappoint a customer or prospect.

At TESTCo, we see things a little differently. We see the primary value of Software QA as the sum of it’s outputs – confidence and speed.

Your customers and prospects expect your software to

Work as promised or advertised

Do it’s job quickly and efficiently

Provide distinct value to them

To honor your promises to your customers and prospects, you need to be confident about the quality of your software. To compete effectively in the broad global marketplace, you need to complete software releases quicker.

All software testing activities and outputs should be focused on providing the software development and business leadership teams with the information they need to make sound technical and business decisions. If you always know the quality level and backlog of your product, then you can make better decisions. This is confidence!

Once confidence is established and maintained, we focus on speed. Not just testing things faster, although that is a part of it. We’ve seen software productivity increases of as much as 50% (think about it, your products to market in half the time?). By the time we’ve established business and technical confidence, we know your software production process and teams well enough that we can introduce small changes that have very large impacts on your ability to quickly and effectively move the features your customers want from idea to reality. This is speed!

We believe your software is your promise to your customers – and we want to help you honor your promises.

How to QA your Software?

There are three critical aspects that should be considered when building your approach to software QA.

Value Proposition, Goals & Plan

Software Testing Experts

Effective and Efficient Software QA Process

The QA Value Proposition

The Value Proposition defines the reason you are testing your software. It converts a loose set of people, things and activities into a focused and coordinated set of actions to meet a goal according to a plan. This insures that the software QA Team is always focused on the most important activities and outcomes and allows the team a way to adjust quickly when circumstances change.

QA By Software Test Engineers

Software QA is inherently a people-centered activity. Sure, test automation can take you a long way in certain circumstances. But, at it’s core, the effectiveness of your software testing will largely be determined by the people on your team. Software Testing Experts, we call them “Test Engineers”, are very different and much more effective than your ordinary “tester”. Test Engineers can engineer a specific approach to your software QA needs. Testers can generally be taught “what” to do but are seldom trained in “how” to do it or “why” it is truly important. Using “testers” instead of “Test Engineers” can be a perilous approach!

The Right QA Processes

Software QA Processes are critical to produce high quality software as quickly as possible. The problem with most software QA processes is that they assume one-size-fits-all. Most software QA processes have some value embedded within them but seldom directly address your situation sufficiently to meet your needs or goals. The best process is one that is tight enough to produce the desired outcomes without deviation, light enough to be easily usable by the people doing the work, flexible enough to adapt to changes in the business or technical environment. No more than that!

Three critical aspects are needed to build a consistent, effective software QA process for your particular situation. You can be deficient in one of them if you have extra strength/capacity in the other two.

TESTCo , a Leader in Software QA

At TESTCo, we’re a software QA company and we believe in honoring promises. We believe that promises are the fundamental human contracts with each other and our environment/circumstances that allows all of the other activities to happen effectively and efficiently.

Everything we do is specifically designed to increase your Confidence and Speed. We combine our Value Proposition Process with Experienced Test Engineers and an active, flexible software QA process to deliver Real Value every day.

We Only Test Software. We Deliver Real Value Every Day – by finding defects that matter and creating Test Assets that are valuable. We start quickly, adjust easily and report daily.

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